2016 Presidential Horse Race

[Cackalacky]

You mean Bernie "The Elitist" Sanders???

 

[wizards8507]

So Pelosi, Obama, Reid, and Clinton are elitist, but Boehner, Bush, Trump, Cruz, etc. aren't (and that is not even going into the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, etc.). Color me confused.

Elitist is about governing philosophy, not personal wealth. It's a "we politicians know better than you normal slobs" mentality that drives state education, health care, etc.

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[Wild Bill]

So Pelosi, Obama, Reid, and Clinton are elitist, but Boehner, Bush, Trump, Cruz, etc. aren't (and that is not even going into the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, etc.). Color me confused.

Urban Dictionary: elitist

Elitists exercise often and eat healthily to keep their bodies fit and desirable-looking. In addition, elitists are too smart to do drugs,

Boehner is too drunk to be an elitist.

Elitists have stimulating conversations that keep their minds fresh and their lives active.

Cruz is gone.

Elitists are proud of being elitists but are secretive at the same time; for instance, the elitist code used by elitists to facilitate their advanced conversations is a well known phenomenon for those who associate with elitists; however, only elitists will ever know this code.

Trump isn't secretive about his status. He's better than us.

Bush is an elitist.

So that's settled.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

I take Bernie as genuine (by DC standards) I really do, and I would feel better with him than you know who. My thing is spending, especially social spending, and it's where I am most Conservative (by normal definitions, not DC current definitions.) I mean a radical cut in spending is not a refusal to up spending or locking spending at a certain level for a few years but I digress,... Bernie has some great sounding ideas, but all I really hear is 'mo money, mo money, mo money, mo money, mo... mo... mo..." just me. When he is your polar opposite on your foremost issue it's hard to get over it.

That's where I am with the Republicans on everything related to education. Bush, Walker, and Kasich are at the top of that list.

 

[Cackalacky]

The Right's Favorite Scare Word

If there's one epithet the right never tires of, it's "elitism." Republicans are constantly accusing Democrats of it this campaign season, as when Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul attacked President Obama as "a liberal elitist … [who] believes that he knows what is best for people." With the Tea Party's rise, conservatives have even begun accusing each other of it, as Sharron Angle, the Nevada GOP nominee did when she charged that Robert Bennett, the outgoing senator from Utah, "has become one of the elitists that is no longer in touch." Other days, they simply lament that the entire country is falling prey to it, as California Senate nominee Carly Fiorina recently did in asserting that "the American Dream is in danger" because of the "elitists" in charge of the government.

Jacob Weisberg
JACOB WEISBERG
Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of The Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy. Follow him on Twitter.

When the rich former CEO of one of America's largest companies casts herself as a victim of elitism, we have surely strayed far from any literal definition of the term. So what do Republicans mean by this French word? Unlike the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, who popularized the term to describe shared identity based on economic interests, Republicans use it with connotations of education, geography, ideology, taste, and lifestyle—such that a millionaire investment banker who works for Goldman Sachs, went to Harvard, and reads the New York Times is an elitist but a billionaire CEO who grew up in Houston, went to a state university, and contributes to Republicans, is not.

Brian Williams picked up on this blurriness when he interviewed John McCain and Sarah Palin together on NBC in 2008 and posed a brilliantly simple question. "Who," he asked the Republican running mates, "is a member of the elite?"

Palin responded first. "I guess just people who think that they're better than everyone else," she said.

McCain then elaborated. "I know where a lot of them live—in our nation's capital and New York City—the ones [Palin] never went to a cocktail party with in Georgetown—who think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves."

Thus did the son and grandson of admirals, a millionaire who couldn't remember how many houses he owned, accuse his mixed-race opponent, raised by a single-mother and only a few years past paying off his student loans, of being the real elite candidate in the campaign.

Though they sound nearly identical, there's a significant distinction between the Palin and the McCain definitions. Palin's definition says elitists are those who think they're better than other people—a category in which by Election Day, on the evidence of her autobiography, included many of the people working for her own campaign. Palin is raw with the disrespect she feels and takes offense at being condescended to by people who, she thinks, think they are better than she is. Her anti-elitism takes the part of all Americans who feel similarly snubbed, and not necessarily in the context of politics. This version is a synonym for social snobbery, with the wrinkle that it's not based on family, ethnicity, or wealth, but rather on the status that in contemporary American society is largely conferred by academic institutions.

McCain, by contrast, defined elitism not as believing you are better than other people but believing that you know better than other people. This is Rand Paul's point about liberals: "They think they can tell us what to do and that most Americans aren't smart enough to take care of themselves," he said in his recent rant against the lower-Manhattan mosque. (So much for libertarianism.) "And I think that's a really arrogant approach to the American people." It also seems to be what Newt Gingrich has in mind when he pops off about "government of the elites by the elites for the elites." In the McCain-Paul-Gingrich usage, an elitist is someone who thinks the opinion of a minority should sometimes prevail over the opinion of a majority.

It is easy to grasp the political resonance of both definitions. Palin's umbrage at liberals who act superior to conservatives plays upon the American ideal of social equality. In a meritocratic society, rejection can bring an even worse sting than under an aristocratic or hereditary one, because those who are less successful can't blame outcomes on the arbitrariness of the system. Palin's posture of victimization is a response to this sense of exclusion. The irony is that she assumes this posture in the service of policies whose effect is to deepen the inequalities of American life.

McCain's protest against anti-majoritarianism likewise strikes a deep popular chord. It has the further advantage of providing an escape hatch from the substance of issues by reframing them in cultural terms. Arguments for raising taxes, expanding health insurance, and fighting climate change are all met with by the rejoinder that some people should quit telling the rest of us how to live our lives. The irony of this position is that this sort of automatic populism is the least conservative of political philosophies. It was Edmund Burke who most famously articulated the principle that elected legislators owe their constituents their best judgments rather than acting as conduits for majority opinion. In fact, it's both valuable and necessary to have experts guide decision-making on complex subjects. I'd rather have a nuclear-energy policy set by Nobel Laureate Steven Chu of Berkeley than by a plebiscite—or have military procurement rules led by John McCain, for that matter.

The problem with the GOP's elite-bashing is not their definition but their contradictions. In practice, conservatives are no less inclined than liberals to adopt superior stances or to tell people how to live their lives. Palin's counter-snobbery holds those who live in the middle of the country, own guns, and go to church are more authentic, more the "real America," than those who live in coastal cities, profess atheism, or prefer a less demonstrative style of patriotism. But the insistence that gay people not be married, or that some go without health insurance, or that gas be lightly taxed, reflect choices about "how other people should live" no less than the opposite positions. Gingrich and others cast democratic decisions as illegitimate only when they conflict with right-wing ideology. If an unelected judge upholds gay marriage, he's practicing liberal elitism. But if the same unelected judge were to invalidate Obama's health care legislation, he would be defending the Constitution. Such hypocrisy is based on the construct of a pre-political state of nature, where we lived in abstract freedom until government arrived to limit and control us.

In the real world, we suffer from self-righteous conservatives as well as smug liberals, from as many Republicans as Democrats who think they know best. Arrogance and paternalism remain bipartisan attitudes. Elitism, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.

 

[GoIrish41]

They are to varying degrees for sure, each fits at least one of the definitions laid out in Cack's post, some fit all.

Elitist is about governing philosophy, not personal wealth. It's a "we politicians know better than you normal slobs" mentality that drives state education, health care, etc.

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Is this why the GOP blocked stricter gun laws when 90 percent of the country was calling for it after Newtown?

 

[wizards8507]

Is this why the GOP blocked stricter gun laws when 90 percent of the country was calling for it after Newtown?

Yes, actually. Just because it's 90% claiming they know better than the 10% doesn't mean you get to trample the liberties of the 10%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

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[IrishJayhawk]

Yes, actually. Just because it's 90% claiming they know better than the 10% doesn't mean you get to trample the liberties of the 10%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

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Right. Like gay marriage.

 

[wizards8507]

Right. Like gay marriage.

Gay couples never asked to be left alone. Nobody was persecuting them. They could do whatever they wanted. What they wanted was for OTHER people to be forced to recognize what they were doing.

Neither straight nor gay couples should have government's blessing on their unions. I'm no fan of the GOP on this issue.

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[Cackalacky]

"Elitist" is actually my safe word.




TMI?

 

[GoIrish41]

Yes, actually. Just because it's 90% claiming they know better than the 10% doesn't mean you get to trample the liberties of the 10%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

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So, they knew better than almost everyone else but they should not be described by your definition? Got it! Sounds like a double standard, but that may just be my elitist point of view. Doesn't have anything to do with the gravy train from the NRA? It is just a "liberty" issue.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

Gay couples never asked to be left alone. Nobody was persecuting them. They could do whatever they wanted. What they wanted was for OTHER people to be forced to recognize what they were doing.

Neither straight nor gay couples should have government's blessing on their unions. I'm no fan of the GOP on this issue.

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I actually agree with the second paragraph. But I think the first paragraph is a contradiction. Straight people had government rights that gay people didn't. Flip it. Why do gay people have to be forced to recognize straight unions?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

 

[wizards8507]

So, they knew better than almost everyone else but they should not be described by your definition? Got it! Sounds like a double standard, but that may just be my elitist point of view.

It's not the GOP saying they know better than the 90%, it's the 90% saying they know better than the 10%.

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[wizards8507]

I actually agree with the second paragraph. But I think the first paragraph is a contradiction. Straight people had government rights that gay people didn't. Flip it. Why do gay people have to be forced to recognize straight unions?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

I agree. But devil's advocate says lots of people get government benefits (benefits, not rights) that others don't get. I don't get Medicare. Ageism. I don't get farm subsidies. Employment discrimination. I don't get an alimony deduction. Discrimination against non-divorced people. The absence of a benefit is not the same as the denial of a right. I would agree with you if the feds were banning gay ceremonies or probibiting churches from performing them, but that was never the case.

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[GoIrish41]

It's not the GOP saying they know better than the 90%, it's the 90% saying they know better than the 10%.

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So I take it you are withdrawing your opposition to Obamacare because the majority is sometimes wrong. The same could be true of any vote that does not you your way. Good thing we have all those elitists on the right to protect us from the tyranny of the (overwhelming) majority.

 

[Cackalacky]

Wait.... not getting farm subsidies is equal to not being able to have the same legal standing as a hetero couple? I am no lawyer but that doesn't sound right.


Seriously wizards...... cmon... you know gays were being denied the same legal standings on many issues by fact they could not marry. Thats not even close to you being denied maternity leave.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Do you see it on the right?

Because this part



Screams conservative to me.

I guess you've never been to country clubs in CT, RI, MA, NY, etc??? Seriously?

 

[wizards8507]

Wait.... not getting farm subsidies is equal to not being able to have the same legal standing as a hetero couple? I am no lawyer but that doesn't sound right.

You're manipulating the language. I could easily rephrase what you just said as "not getting MFJ tax rates is equal to not being able to have the same legal standing as a farmer? I am no lawyer but that doesn't sound right."

Again, this is all under my "devil's advocate" font. My real opinion is that neither "farmer" nor "married person" should be a special legal status that gets any kind of privilege whatsoever, regardless of sexuality or acreage.

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[Cackalacky]

There are apparently 1138 benefits rights and protections given by legal marriage

Overview of Federal Benefits Granted to Married Couples | Resources | Human Rights Campaign

One of the charts in the link:

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

There has never been a debate like that one. Donald Trump is in control of your election season. No matter how many faux fights that Christie starts, or how many well phrased liberty speeches Rand makes or how many appeals to the faithful Huckabee makes, nobody is talking about anyone else. All you guys keep hoping against hope that you are right when you say he has no chance of getting the nomination, but you aren't sure anymore. It seems a quarter of your party has gone "all in" on crazy. All the other candidates are getting no traction whatsoever -- at least not anything like Trump's. He is up at all hours of the night tweeting insults at FoxNews moderators and speaking publicly about a woman's menstrual cycle. And he does not drop in the polls. Meanwhile he is way ahead while calling women fat pigs and refusing to swear he will not run an end around on the party. That is not a normal debate and this is no ordinary GOP primary. None of that kind of craziness is happening on the other side. If the GOP is not broken, it is difficult for me to understand what broken is.

It was debate number 1. Many more to come. Trump is a celebrity, an outspoken one at that. I don't have a problem with him running, he isn't my top choice, but the issue is he's garnering way too much attention and we aren't hearing enough from people like Carson and Fiorina.

To my original point: take the blinders off and realize that both parties have their issues right now in regards to 2016. And your socialist hero Sanders ain't gonna be the guy.

 

[wizards8507]

So I take it you are withdrawing your opposition to Obamacare because the majority is sometimes wrong. The same could be true of any vote that does not you your way. Good thing we have all those elitists on the right to protect us from the tyranny of the (overwhelming) majority.

My opposition to Obamacare has nothing to do with its popularity. Even if I were the only person who thought so, I believe the mandate to be illegal and unethical.

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[Cackalacky]

You're manipulating the language. I could easily rephrase what you just said as "not getting MFJ tax rates is equal to not being able to have the same legal standing as a farmer? I am no lawyer but that doesn't sound right."

Again, this is all under my "devil's advocate" font. My real opinion is that neither "farmer" nor "married person" should be a special legal status that gets any kind of privilege whatsoever, regardless of sexuality or acreage.

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I understand your stance but seeing that is not reality, you put not being able to marry on par with not getting farm subsidies. Being married isnt a benefit, it has actual legal reprucussions. As i provided above. I didnt manipulate the language. I didnt even take a liberty with it. Thats what you typed.

 

[GoIrish41]

It was debate number 1. Many more to come. Trump is a celebrity, an outspoken one at that. I don't have a problem with him running, he isn't my top choice, but the issue is he's garnering way too much attention and we aren't hearing enough from people like Carson and Fiorina.

To my original point: take the blinders off and realize that both parties have their issues right now in regards to 2016. And your socialist hero Sanders ain't gonna be the guy.

Guess I will have to vote for your guy Paul, then .... Oh, wait!

The Dems problems are nothing like the GOP problems. Be honest with yourself Lep. The GOP is a shit show right now.

 

[wizards8507]

Being married isnt a benefit, it has actual legal reprucussions.

It shouldn't.

EDIT: Along those lines, what is your opinion of a gay couple that got married in a state where it was not recognized? What about a straight couple that gets married in a church but does not register with the State? Are both couples unmarried in your eyes just because they weren't subject to the legal repercussions? The marriage itself has nothing to do with the benefits or legal repercussions or anything else. Those are just side effects, not the definition of marriage itself.

 

[GoIrish41]

My opposition to Obamacare has nothing to do with its popularity. Even if I were the only person who thought so, I believe the mandate to be illegal and unethical.

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Well the the Supreme Court disagrees with you, you elitist.

 

[wizards8507]

Well the the Supreme Court disagrees with you, you elitist.

If anyone is an elitist, it's the Supreme Court. All of them.

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[GoIrish41]

If anyone is an elitist, it's the Supreme Court. All of them.

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All those GOP judges, tho.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

It shouldn't.

EDIT: Along those lines, what is your opinion of a gay couple that got married in a state where it was not recognized? What about a straight couple that gets married in a church but does not register with the State? Are both couples unmarried in your eyes just because they weren't subject to the legal repercussions? The marriage itself has nothing to do with the benefits or legal repercussions or anything else. Those are just side effects, not the definition of marriage itself.

But it does.

 

[Cackalacky]

It shouldn't.

EDIT: Along those lines, what is your opinion of a gay couple that got married in a state where it was not recognized? What about a straight couple that gets married in a church but does not register with the State? Are both couples unmarried in your eyes just because they weren't subject to the legal repercussions? The marriage itself has nothing to do with the benefits or legal repercussions or anything else. Those are just side effects, not the definition of marriage itself.

But it DOES and has been for well over 5000 years. You are saying that a global human cultural phenomenon shouldn't be addressed by a government. I find it hard to believe you don't see this. Marriage has financial, property, status, and societal origins, bearing and ramifications.

M opinion matters little on the hypotheticals. If they have the legal acknowledgement at a minimum from the jurisdiction that issued their licenses then yes. If not then no. They are not fully protected like your or I would be in any state in the country.

 

[wizards8507]

But it DOES and has been for well over 5000 years. You are saying that a global human cultural phenomenon shouldn't be addressed by a government. I find it hard to believe you don't see this. Marriage has financial, property, status, and societal origins, bearing and ramifications.

M opinion matters little on the hypotheticals. If they have the legal acknowledgement at a minimum from the jurisdiction that issued their licenses then yes. If not then no. They are not fully protected like your or I would be in any state in the country.

That's your understanding of marriage? Seriously? I'm married because my wife and I said vows to one another, not because the State of Indiana said "yep, we're cool with that."

Who cares if the government has had its hand in marriage for thousands of years? "It's been that way for a long ass time" is probably the worst philosophical argument I've ever heard and could also be used to justify slavery. Want to know why the government has had its hand in marriage (and everything else) for thousands of years? Because people like to exert power over other people. Our Constitution was set up to prevent that kind of control over every facet of our lives.